The word that best sums it up is "Wow!", so much stuff happening in one hit. We have the Steem Proposal system (SPS), which is my favourite, other successful chains such as Dash, Ethereum and Ripple have foundations and worker proposal systems, currently Steem is operating like a country without a budget and relies 100% on the private sector (Steemit Inc) and smaller app developers to build on and advertise Steem, the latter having very little resources to make a difference.
The SPS was initially to be funded by a Steemit donation, which seems to now be around 200K STEEM once off, some people recall a higher figure (6 Mil) being thrown around but I personally don't know where to reference that, which is another reason why a forum would be good to document and archive such things.
From the outset I have said that donation-based funding will not be sustainable long term and only emissions based inflation funding will always ensure a steady budget for growth. Most stakeholders and witnesses agree on this, but what they don't agree in is where the funds should come from, some stakeholders think that only author/curator rewards should be used as a funding source because that is where the largest drain on the economy is.
Others think that stakeholder interest stake should not be touched as this makes Steem a less attractive investment vehicle.
My take on this is that all sources should be taxed fairly equally to avoid finger-pointing and conspiracy theories that witnesses and stakeholders are trying to screw the authors, basically we are all in this together and should all shoulder the funding tax, the current split is 75% Rewards, 15% SP Interest, 10% Witness. My suggestion is 70% Rewards 14% SP Interest 9% Witness and 7% to the DAO.
There are a few others who support the above proposed split but seems majority are pushing for 65% Rewards and 10% DAO, with witness and interest untouched.
I understand the reasoning that if witness rewards are reduced, many backup witnesses may drop off and reduce the security of the chain, also consensus witnesses won't have the resources they need to run price feed servers and several backups and may cut corners which could be bad for chain performance and security, I personally run 4 servers in total. My suggestion is that then witness rewards be adjusted to shift more away from the top 20 consensus witnesses to the backup witnesses and I am totally fine with that.
To me taking from the SP interest inflation is fine also, psychological test...put your hand up if you even knew you were earning cira 2% APR on your staked Steem Power? Steemitwallet.com doesn't give any indication of this and I argue that the interest has any bearing on outsiders wanting to invest in Steem, because how would they know about it? I also argue that if investors want a decent APR they can just delegate on https://dlease.io where every day there is about 75K of Steem Power orders between 16 and 20% APR and would encourage more people to rent if their lease orders get filled timeously, this is the investment vehicle right there, 2% is a joke and you will get more on margin lending and on most masternodes so I don't buy that it makes a difference, maybe it stops some stakeholders from dumping more, I don't know. I personally don't even feel it and won't if it gets reduced.
(No mention at all about interest inflation in the wallet)
Regarding the Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP), I think the free downvote pool is a good idea, this will give 25% free downvotes without affecting your voting power, this means we can really clean up this place of trash and spam, I hope this can be delegated because I would rather give that responsibility to people who are more in touch with what content is considered inappropriate as my focus is on business on the Steem blockchain.
The Convergent Linear Rewards curve ... say what now? Ok I don't have a PhD in mathematics, but from what I understand this to be is that the rewards start off as sublinear, meaning that rewards are less as the first few votes come in, once the content is proven by consensus to be vote-worthy then it converges to linear as it gets more traction, linear is what we have now. I don't think this is much of an issue and is worth a try so I'll approve this.
Now for the contentious part, the shift from 75% Author/ 25% Curator rewards to 50/50! The idea behind this is to encourage more curation and less self-voting, I don't hate the idea but I really think it is too much for one Hardfork, especially since author rewards are already going to be reduced in the SPS, content is the inventory and lifeblood of the ecosystem, on one hand, paying less for content creation could mean that we get lower quality and fewer posts, however there is an argument that with improved curation, good posts may actually get voted on more and not have to buy votes from bots as much or at all.
There is another benefit, this means that 12.5% is shifted from liquid author rewards to staked curation SP rewards, basically reducing circulating supply which means less dumping! Great, the Steem price may go up a bit with reduced selling pressure, there is always a silver lining to every dark cloud.
This will encourage people working together and curating as teams rather than solo self voters and could bring about a refreshing change and new business prospects. Services like @steemvoter (Guilds and autovoting) and @dlease (Steem Power leasing) will continue to be in demand, while bot services like @minnowbooster will decline in use.
At the end of the day, radical change is needed as Steem slowly loses ground on the Coinmarketcap top 100, these changes can always be tweaked in a future HF anyway. I would have liked to have seen the SPS done first and gain good traction and community support and think the EIP might give the SPS a muted landing and the distract from its short term effectiveness and community embrace, I am also however sensitive to the fact that more HF's mean more exchange node upgrades and downtime for exchanges and potential delisting of Steem so makes sense to push it all into one from a technical perspective.
Please be assured that I will remain a faithful consensus witness on the chain and as CEO of BuildTeam will continue to strive to make Steem great again.
If you like what I do, vote for thecryptodrive witness with this vote link: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Or use the quick SteemConnect link: https://app.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=thecryptodrive&approve=1
